Donwill Is the Terry Gross of Rap Music
The Tanya Morgan MC chats about his second life as a show host, his love of house plants, and biking around New York.
Photo by Kaushik Kalidindi for Okayplayer
Donwill has been a part of my musical education since I first started falling in love with hip-hop as a teenager. That’s the wonderful thing about the Cincinnati-raised, New York-based Swiss army knife. He’s not just a rapper, a DJ, a podcast host; he’s an emblem of the joy inherent in rap music. He’s a voice for its history, an advocate for its present, and a tastemaker for its future. This role in rap began in the mid-2000s, when he and his longtime friend, rapper/producer Von Pea, formed Tanya Morgan.
Morgan would become a staple of indie rap well into the 2010s, creating a link between the backpack rap era bubbling online and the sharp, lyrical, witty stylings carried forward by rappers like Open Mike Eagle and Quelle Chris.
Tanya Morgan’s impact was probably greater than any monetary riches the group found, and Donwill began expanding his scope in different directions. He continued recording with Von Pea, but tour dates were scant and he began DJ’ing, thanks in large part to his friend Wyatt Cenac. He remembers thinking during an early gig, You’re going to pay me to stand here and play a song that I really like?
Don has since built his career around the music he loves, trading in time at the recording studio for podcast sessions and interviews with rap legends. The latter is part of his latest series, The Almanac of Rap, which is currently on its fourth season. The project is made in collaboration with Okayplayer and has taken home two Webby Awards. Recent episodes include interviews with Bun B, Masta Ace, and Havoc. The show has found a wide, passionate audience thanks to the way Donwill blends research and passion with the humor and joy that’s infused all of his work. We spoke last month to chat about segueing out of life as a rapper, his obsession with house plants, and whether or not he’ll ever need a resume again. Check out the conversation below, which has been edited for clarity and length.
How long have you been in Brooklyn for?
It’s been about 20 years in New York now.
In what ways has the city changed for an artist—either for good or bad?
It would be for the worst for me personally, because the DIY spaces have seemed to go away. Part of that means that I’ve aged out of that scene in some ways, because I know they’re still happening and I know there are still things going on, but I’m just not as plugged into wherever those are. That’s something a lot of people who live here for a long time witness, these cycles, how temporary spaces have become. There might be some place that meant the world to you; you might’ve met your wife there, you might’ve gotten married there, you might’ve discovered you need to get a divorce there, and it’s gone two years later. Whenever my friend Von P—the other guy from Tanya Morgan—comes back to Brooklyn, it’s just a different city for him. Last time I was like, Do you still consider this place home? He was like, I have a memory of it, but my memory of it and what exists now are not the same things.
Tanya Morgan. The best. Do people still give you props from that era?
It’s funny. In the circles that I move in, people don’t know that I rap in. In the comedy world, they legitimately have no idea that I rap. These are people who’ve known me for 10. Part of that is because we just don’t perform anymore. We put out albums and I perform intermittently, but I definitely still get compliments from people that know. People still come up like, Yo, I rock with Tanya Morgan. I’m on tour with Michelle Buteau right now, and as a part of the tour I open the show with a 20-minute rap set. I’ve never really left performing, but performing as a solo artist was a thing I never really did. I only really performed with the group. I kind of put the group above all in a De La Soul type of way.
Did you see the writing on the wall for independent rap and how hard it would be to sustain a living? Why did you start to move away from that aspect of your career?
When I first said I wanted to do music, I was a little bit older than most people who start out. I was in my 20s already and I was like, I’m going to put out some albums. I had jobs, and I just quit all the jobs and I moved to New York. In New York, I had temp jobs and stuff, but I found that those jobs limited me. I was doing administrative assistant work and stuff like that that didn’t really complement a career in music, at least for the positions I held. So I just kept trying to find these jobs that were mobile or music adjacent.
For a while I was writing for a website, KicksOnFire, writing sneaker reviews. We would be on tour and I would be blogging the entire time, looking for wi-fi and typing stuff up. This was back when the laptops were fucking heavy. Once touring did slow down, the writing was on the wall. It became, how do I not get a job? I’ve always been interested in podcasting and I’ve always been interested in presenting music to people—presenting information to people. I just love that form of creativity and the freedom it affords. I didn’t think it would become what it has for me. For a long time, DJ’ing was the thing that I settled on. I was like, I’m good at this. One of my first DJ gigs was actually in the comedy world.
My friend Wyatt Cenac had a comedy show and he was like, You should come DJ it. I was like, I’m not that good, and he said, Nobody’s coming to hear music, so that’s fine [laughs]. For an hour before every show, I was just fucking around on the decks playing music. If you make music, you know music well enough to understand song structure, BPM, lead-ins, transitions, all that shit. I honed my skills in that space and then started DJ’ing other things. DJ’ing is exciting. It’s the one thing that I really, truly love. I feel lucky every time I get to DJ stuff because I’m playing music. I’ve done so many different things and I’m like, Oh, this is the thing that I get to do? This is crazy. You’re going to pay me to stand here and play a song that I really like?
When did podcasting enter the picture?
The first radio show podcast-esque thing that I did was with Von Pea. In 2008, we used to do a thing called Lessondary Radio. I don’t remember how we would post it, but it was an mp3 or something. I would post it to my blogspot and we would make these little radio shows where I’d be like, You’re listening to the Donwill Show. Me and Von would talk. Then we got a radio show on PNC Radio, and we had a show around the same time as the Combat Jack Show. Lessondary Radio just kind of fell apart because of touring and all that other stuff.
When podcasting actually became podcasting in the hip-hop space, I kept doing it. I did another show called Bad With Names where I would just interview my friends to try and get better at conversations. Turn on a mic and talk to people. I did a show similar to the Almanac of Rap called The Book of Rhymes. I would interview artists about their music and a specific rhyme of my choice. Then the Almanac of Rap happened. The Almanac of Rap and DJ’ing are very much tied together in a way that none of those other shows could be.
